


So, This is Death

by Ceris_Malfoy



Series: Sidus Ad Quirito Diabolo [2]
Category: Transformers: Shattered Glass
Genre: Alternate Universe - Dark, Gen, Horror, Introspection, M/M, PassivelyInsane!Starscream, Tragedy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-27
Updated: 2012-12-27
Packaged: 2017-11-22 15:31:01
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,086
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/611354
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ceris_Malfoy/pseuds/Ceris_Malfoy
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"There sits the judge and jury from whose lips has passed your judgment. Isn't he beautiful?"</p>
            </blockquote>





	So, This is Death

" _May the devil make a ladder of your backbone – while he is picking apples in the garden of Hell."_  


_-Old Irish toast_

Megatron trembles in the grasp of this impossibly strong mech. He has never been so terrified in all his life, not even when facing down Optimus Prime – who had been as crazy as he had been cruel – but this mech…. This mech has torn through the Autobot Army as if they were mere younglings playing at war and violence and he himself the incarnation of pain given life. Perhaps, he thinks wildly to himself, that's what this mech is.

"Why?" he asks plaintively, barely managing to choke even that question out under the force of his fear. But he needs to know, needs to understand what he has done to deserve this, to deserve death. He has always strived to live a good life, has always strived to protect those weaker than himself, and when the Tyrant rose, he had done his best to prevent the Ascension. He knows it is conceited of himself, illogical and arrogant to assume that anything he has done might have prevented this – or, Primus forbid, encouraged it. His wild optics again roams across the corpses strewn haphazardly across the barren wasteland that once upon a time had been Crystal City, easily picking out friend and foe alike.

All dead. All torn into savagely and without regret or sympathy. All with facial plating frozen in silent masks of terror and pain. Optics are dull, mouths open in eternal screams that will forever be silent, but aren't because he can still hear them, desperate and begging, and his ember trembles inside his chassis. He knows. He knows what is in store for him, and it terrifies him more than any other death. Death was once nothing to be scared of – he had long ago made his peace with the fact that he was mortal, and mortals died. Such was the way of the world. He would die, peacefully or murdered, it mattered not, and he would go to join his ancestors in the Vault of Embers, and finally know the peace and serenity of being welcomed home to Primus.

That was once. This is now. Now, there stands a silver and gold mech with bone-wings and poison-green optics and savage claws and serrated teeth, and he has watched, first in barely-comprehending horror, and then in sheer mortal terror, as this mech had fed on the embers of those under his command. Good mechs, bright mechs, mechs too young, gone. Megatron instinctively knows that none of those mechs will reach the Vault of Embers. None of them will ever reach Primus' ever-loving reach. And neither will he.

"Why?" he asks again, and this impossibly strong mech chuckles, voice a grating, deeply resonant purr that he can physically feel scrape along his systems. The clawed hand around his neck tightens, strangling, cutting off vital energon lines, and he chokes. Warnings blare throughout his systems, and already he feels light-headed and dizzy. But the mech is forcibly turning his head, forcing his fuzzy gaze to…

…a seeker. _That_ seeker, to be precise, the very one he'd left in an Autobot prison because, despite his personal feelings on the matter, he hadn't had the resources to properly support and rehabilitate his _own_ troops let alone a stranger that had been so badly damaged that the mech in question most likely would never fully recover. He had had priorities, and though it had killed something in him to do it, he had. He had left the seeker to hell and torment. He still dreamed of those too-blue apathetic optics, staring at him as if seeing right through him, and how those optics had flared gold-red, the color of molten steel and fire, when he'd made his decision. He had regretted his decision later, regrets it still, and there had not been a day where he did not think of what he had condemned that seeker to.

"Look at him," that too-deep voice purrs in his audial, and so he does, vision going fuzzy, graying at the edges, but he is unable to look away. That seeker, bearing many scars, shredded wings, and too-many half-healed wounds to count, manages to sit with an air very much like a king, a _god_ , surveying his domain, and his domain is this field of death that is all that remains of two full armies. The seeker's form is impassive and still; obviously not bothered by the fact that the make-shift throne he sits upon has been build out of the corpses of other mechs. The seeker is watching him, gaze burning with hate and endless, endless rage.

"There sits the judge and jury from whose lips has passed your judgment," the voice continues to purr, and those words seal for him the image his fritzing processor is building. If the mech holding him is pain incarnate, then that seeker sitting so still and calm and watching them with those eerie gold-red optics that burn, _burn_ , _**burn**_ is _rage_. Rage incarnate sat before him, watching him with the same apathetic attitude that had watched as hundreds were slaughtered and fed upon.

"W-wh-why?" he manages to grind out, something in his throat cracking and crushing in ways that would have alarmed him if it weren't for the fact that he will be dead very shortly. But his vision is swirling now and the alarms blaring like the screams _still_ echoing in his audials have gained a dim, bell-like quality. _The bell tolls for us all_ , he thinks madly.

"Because _you_ exist and _they_ don't," the mech holding him says, as if that is reason enough for the carnage that has taken place, as if that could possibly condone the eating of embers and the denial of paradise. But it doesn't; it _couldn't_.

But it doesn't matter. He can feel his main energon lines bursting from the pressure building up behind them, and instead of continuing to prolong his torment by asking questions that ultimately don't matter, _won't_ matter in the long run - what's done is done - he instead chooses to be thankful that it will all soon come to an end. The last thing he sees is that seeker's burning, hating gaze and the slight curl of a smile – soft but oh-so-cruel. The last thing he hears is the silver-and-gold mech's too-deep voice purring in his audio: "Isn't he beautiful?"

_Yes_ , Megatron thinks sadly as he finally slides into oblivion. _Beautiful_.

**Author's Note:**

> Mmmm…because I couldn't leave Megatron's death as simplistic and vague as I did in the main fic. XD
> 
> Originally posted on Fanfiction.net on 02/01/12.


End file.
